Thinking with Care. Unraveling and mending in an ethnography of craft embroidery and technology

This paper reflects on practices of careful unraveling and mending as being intimately constitutive of particular embodied thinking processes. My starting point is an ethnography of the dialogues between calado embroidery and engineering design. Hence, through describing the partial unraveling of fabrics intended to become calado and their subsequent mending through weaving, I question the double agency of these practices: over the ethnography that approaches them, and about the effects of ethnography, affected by calado practices, on engineers’ imaginaries and expectations about design and about the craft’s context. Throughout the paper I emphasize how such processes of unraveling and mending are constituted by care in relation to bodies and materialities. Thus I pay special attention to how these processes intertwine stories about embodied and domestic learning and ambiguous invisibility crosscut by gender in particular ways.